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Government Surveillance vs Privacy: what’s better?

We haven’t witnessed any public debate on the level of watch citizens could be put through, and on what the red lines should be when making use of intrusive mechanisms.

The tussle between government agencies’ actual necessity for a high quality, real-time interception, surveillance as well as monitoring mechanism through the Central Monitoring System, on the one hand, and demands by civil rights, privacy and free speech activists, to ensure higher privacy for citizens in view of CMS, on the other, is definitely gaining ground. India today boasts almost 900 million mobile subscribers, approximately 160 million Internet users and about 85 million citizens on social media. By the way, the overall number of Internet and social media users is expected to double by 2017.

The discussions have been coloured by the startling revelation closely connected with the PRISM project, which might have meant that the privacy of millions of Indian Internet users could have been seriously compromised.

At the same time, the CMS project, aimed at drastically improving the capability of security agencies to protect national security and withstand crime, including terrorism, has also generated serious privacy issues.

First, very little real information is actually available regarding the CMS working procedure, technical capabilities as well as privacy safeguards in the public domain. Obviously, while governments worldwide don’t want to share information about their surveillance as well as monitoring systems, successive authorities in India have fared no better.

Major unanswered issues include the uncontrolled employment of technical capability as well as intrusive technologies, capable of instant, real time and also deep search surveillance. There has been no debate in Parliament or outside regarding the level of surveillance citizens need to be put through or whether there should be strict red lines when utilizing intrusive surveillance mechanisms, even when technology presents just an option.